1993 - The Blue Afternoon (38 page)

The atmosphere was strangely calm. The sun shone in a milky, hazy sky and the calls of the birds were silenced by the noise of the guns. There was a faint moaning from the group gathered by the pool and some of the littlest children were crying. But the men and boys waited silently to be selected, their heads bowed, saying nothing. While the officer reloaded his pistol, the other two men took over. And always there was the same cry, “Remember Balangiga!”, before the sound of the gun going off. This went on until all the men and boys had been shot, then the Americans shouldered their rifles and packs and marched off down the road to Santa Rosa. Both Flaviano and Ortega had been among the victims. Carriscant learned later that the column had been shot at the previous night while it was bivouacking about a mile from San Teodoro and two men had been killed and four wounded. The assault on the villagers was their act of reprisal. Twenty-two men and boys had been killed.

Carriscant related all this to me in an even, unemotional voice. We sat there in silence after he had finished as I tried to take in the implications of all this.

“Do you think,” I asked him, “that the officer was Sieverance?”

“I don’t know. Certainly Sieverance reminded me of him. That officer was bearded, but fair like Sieverance. Something about his posture too. I couldn’t be sure. I asked Delphine if Sieverance had ever served in Batangas but she said she had no idea.” He shrugged. “There was a likeness, but I was quite far away, forty, fifty yards.”

“Was it Sieverance’s unit? Do you know the name of the unit?”

“No.”

“Did you report it?”

Carriscant screwed up his face. “You’ve got to understand that fifty-four thousand people died in Batangas in those months. Killed or died from disease, starvation, cholera. My mother wrote to protest to General Bell, but received no reply. Such incidents were commonplace.” He paused, then said carefully, “The only person I told was Pantaleon.”

“Why?”

“I had to tell someone.”

“Some American officers were tried for atrocities.”

“And General Smith was even cashiered. Unfortunately I had no names, no information. And the San Teodoro massacre was small beer. In Batangas one group of thirteen hundred prisoners was systematically killed over six days after digging their own graves. It was a nasty little war.” He sighed. “In some ways it’s as well that the world has forgotten it.”

We looked at each other, his face gave nothing away: his features were set, his eyes tired, as if the telling of his story had exhausted him.

“Any the wiser?” he asked.

“No. But you haven’t answered my question. Who killed Ward and Braun?”

“I thought it was obvious. It must have been Cruz.”

“Cruz? Are you serious?”

“The man was mad. He hated Americans. He was obsessed with his heart operation. Remember he had deliberately made an incision in that man’s heart in order to make some cardiac sutures. I think Cruz was going slowly mad, anyway. The war, the loss of the colony. Even my presence at the hospital meant his reputation was in decline also. So he became obsessed with making his name in some way. And in those days the heart was the organ that most frustrated us. That’s the only explanation for the mutilations. I remember once he told me he needed European hearts, I don’t know why, some mad prejudice, I suppose. I don’t think he killed the woman though. That was random. A Tondo stabbing that confused the picture.”

I sighed, uncertain, troubled by this shocking story. One sunny morning in San Teodoro…

Carriscant leaned forward, his chin on the knuckles of his clasped hands, staring at me.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying this, Kay. You’re an attractive woman, but you don’t want to get any stouter. Shall we go?”

I sit in my room bathed, ready for bed, and write the names of the dead down. Ward, Braun, the unnamed woman, Sieverance. Then I make another list.

• Pantaleon Quiroga
  
• Dr Isidro Cruz
  
• Jepson Sieverance
  

I am not sure why I am doing this, or what I hope it will achieve, my brain is fugged and sluggish after all this new information, but I need to write things down as they occur to me, almost as an exercise, simply to set some process of deduction rolling, to see if the name on the page, in stark black and white, will tell me something. I consider the options.

Pantaleon—Paton Bobby’s suspect. He knew about the massacre, he knew about Carriscant’s suspicion about Sieverance. Were Ward and Braun the other two soldiers on the bridge? Perhaps Pantaleon’s connection with General Elpidio provided him with that sort of information. But I found it hard to figure Pantaleon as an insurrecto fifth columnist.

Carriscant’s suspect was Cruz. Seeking strong American hearts for his experiments. But why dump the bodies at key sites of the first day of the war? Or was that just coincidence? Almost everywhere around Manila had some significance considered in the light of February 1899. Cruz did seem somewhat deranged, but I found it hard to believe that he would go so far in his need to make a name for himself.

But Bobby clearly suspected him as well, why else raid his laboratory?…

Jepson Sieverance was my idea. A notion I had. Carriscant told me that an official commission—the Lodge Commission—investigating the post-Balangiga atrocities was sitting throughout 1902. Sieverance, an ambitious young officer, might just have thought it worth removing his two accomplices. Or perhaps Braun and Ward were blackmailing him in some way? Assuming of course that the man Carriscant saw had been Sieverance in the first place, and Carriscant had never been fully convinced of this…On the other hand, Sieverance certainly didn’t commit suicide. But then we knew who killed him. Or did we?

I seem to be achieving nothing. I write down one more name:

SALVADOR CARRISCANT

Tomorrow we go to pay a visit to Senhora Lopes do Livio. Let us see what revelations the new day brings.

W
e breakfasted in the dining room on small hard rolls and honey, washed down with a reasonable pot of coffee. Carriscant didn’t seem at all nervous and ate three of the rolls with a gourmandising enthusiasm, asking the waiter to confirm if the honey were clover, or from bees feeding on some other species of flower.

“I can taste it, can’t you? The clover,” he said to me.

“A fragrance, a stratum below the surface. But if not clover then lavender, or broom perhaps.”

The waiter was unable to help him and to me the honey tasted of honey. Besides I was not hungry: I left half my roll, drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette rather earlier in the day than normal. I asked Carriscant if we should telephone ahead or send a note to explain who we were but he preferred to go unannounced.

“Suppose it’s not her,” he explained. “We don’t want to waste their time. We’ll just turn up, much the best way. Bound to be in on a Sunday.” I let him do as he wished. His mood was calm, almost buoyant, whereas I felt a curious sense of foreboding, as if I were about to visit a doctor or specialist, on the point of learning facts about which I would rather remain ignorant.

At about midday we rendezvoused at the hotel entrance and hailed a taxi. The day was fresh and sunny, and above our heads the strip of sky between the buildings was a perfect washed-out blue. Joao hurried out from reception with an umbrella which he insisted on our taking. “There will be rain in the afternoon,” he said with adamantine certainty. “Better to be prepared.”

We asked the taxi to drop us outside the gates to the botanical gardens and we walked the short distance to Senhora Lopes do Livio’s address. She lived on the second floor of a large apartment block with ornately wrought balconies. A high arched doorway led through to a narrow cobbled courtyard; to the left was the entrance foyer where a stooped old porter stood on a strip of red carpet leading to the elevator. The walls were lined with a small collection of pots containing dusty undernourished ferns struggling to grow in the perpetual gloom. We decided to walk up the stairs to the second floor Carriscant’s suggestion. I think he was beginning to feel the enormous pressures of this encounter for the first time and the chance of delaying matters even for a few seconds was suddenly very desirable.

I reached to press the bell—set beneath a worn and polished brass plate reading ‘Lopes do Livio’—but Carriscant’s touch on my elbow made me hesitate.

“How do I look?” he said. “Very good,” I said. “Very handsome and distinguished.” He smiled broadly at me, his pleasure manifest, and my heart went out to him. I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He was most surprised and his hand went instantly to the spot where my lips had touched him, as if I’d daubed him with paint or pricked him with a pin.

“Bless you, Kay,” he said, moved. “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” I said. “Look it may not even be her. We may be tramping around the sweetshops of Europe for a while yet.”

I rang the bell and after some moments we heard footsteps and the door was opened by a young man, about my age. He was tall with unruly curly hair forced severely into an immaculate middle parting, and full rather pouting lips. There was a guarded, suspicious quality about him; he seemed to hold his body angled back slightly, as if pre-emptively fearful of some act of aggression.

He said a few words to us in Portuguese.

“Do you speak English?” I asked.

“Yes I do,” he said, with a slight accent. “Are you English?”

“We’re American. We would like to see Senhora Lopes do Livio, if that were possible.”

“I regret. My mother is not well. She does not receive visitors.”

I could sense Carriscant stiffen beside me.

“I’m a very old friend,” Carriscant said. “I’ve come all the way from the United States to meet her again.”

The man frowned. “She said nothing of this to me.”

“She didn’t know I was coming. It took me some time to find her.”

“I am not knowing if my mother had some friends in America…” His suspicion was acute, suddenly we were importunate salesmen, hawkers who had not used the tradesmen’s entrance.

“If you tell her that Dr Salvador Carriscant has come to see her I’m sure she’ll grant me a moment of her time.”

The tone of confidence and marginal hostility in Carriscant’s voice was sufficient to have us admitted even though the young man’s reluctance was palpable. He showed us into a large pale green sitting room, dimly lit, the shutters drawn half to. The style of the furnishings was old and the swagged green velvet drapes at the three long windows were threadbare. But the proportions of the room were elegant and the furniture of good quality, well chosen. Dark over-varnished portraits of whiskered and waxed military types hung on the walls. I wondered if these were the Lopes do Livio forebears. We took our seat on a gilded bergere, sitting primly, our hands on our knees like candidates waiting for an interview.

“Nervous?” Carriscant asked.

“No…Yes, actually, very.”

“I’m terrified,” he said with a grin. “Blood turned to ice water.”

We waited for a good ten minutes before the young man returned. His manner had not altered.

“My mother will see you,” he said, clearly annoyed at this decision. “But I’d ask you to be staying for a short time. She becomes most tired. Please follow me.”

“I’ll wait here,” I said to Carriscant.

He took my hand. “No you don’t,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “You’ve got to be with me.”

We held hands as we were led down a surprisingly long corridor—the apartment was huge—loose parquet tiles clicking dully under our feet like dice shaken in a leather cup. The stern young man rapped lightly on a door and held it open for us. And now I felt the fear flow through me, a fear for Carriscant rather than myself. Every facet, every aspect of his life had been conditioned for over thirty years by the possibility of this moment one day occurring, and here we now were. The prospect of it somehow disappointing him, of it letting him down—or worse—of it destroying him, was almost insupportable. He squeezed my hand and we stepped into the room together.

This is what I saw. An old lady sat in an armchair before a tall muslin-draped window that gave on to a distant prospect of the botanic gardens. The screened light that fell on her face was soft and pearly. She was thin and her face had sharpened with age, her skin stretched and seamed, but still strong-looking, the nose prominent, the eyes dark and watchful. Her grey hair was pulled loosely behind her head in a bun. She was still beautiful, I thought, in a severe way, in that semi-hidden manner you encounter with certain old women, that still allows you to see the young woman that once was. She seemed far older than Carriscant. Her hands rested in her lap, or rather, rested in the air above her lap, shaking quite noticeably, unnaturally. The thumb and forefinger of her right hand made continuous small movements, as if rolling a pill between them.

Carriscant moved forward to her while I stepped to one side.

“Salvador?” she said, her voice soft, her American accent barely pronounced.

“Yes, Delphine.”

“Don’t lurk in the shadows like that. I can’t see you.”

“Here I am.”

She looked at him. “You’ve got a belly on you.”

“Big appetite, you know me.”

He knelt beside her chair and took her shaking hands in his, their heads moving together. They kissed each other, long and slow, full of a decent and selfless ardour, a real and gentle carnality. I thought of the last kiss they had shared in the darkness of the Calle Francisco, in Intramuros, in Manila, in 1903…A whole generation had intervened, half a lifetime vanished. They broke apart. She touched Carriscant’s face with her trembling fingers. He pressed her palm to his mouth.

“Mother, please, this is intolerable!” the young man said loudly. I could see the shock on his face, disturbed to see such passion in old people.

“Oh, shut up, Nando,” she said, her eyes never leaving Carriscant. “Don’t be such a prig.”

Carriscant touched her jaw with his knuckles, touched her neck. “Beautiful Delphine,” he said, dreamily. “How beautiful you look.”